S1E13: 5 Secrets to Organize Your Time for Your Business
Female entrepreneurs are probably the busiest group of entrepreneurs because of the amount of responsibilities we have in business AND in personal lives. The question now is how can we effectively organize time for our business?
In this episode, I share my 5 secrets to organize your time for your business!
Listen to the Episode below:
In this episode, you'll hear about:
Log your time
Identify time wasters
Delegate, don't abdicate
80/20 Rule
Plan your day
#1 - Log Your Time
First up is to log your time. Pick a day and either grab a sheet of paper or start a spreadsheet or use a tool like toggl.com and begin your workday.
Write down or log in everything that you do over the course of that day. You will want to be as detailed as possible, write down the minutes, write down what project you are working on and who the client might be. Track everything that you do, even if that includes time spent brainstorming or just focusing.
Try not to change your behaviour from a typical day just because you are logging your time. You want to do this to make it as accurate as possible for analyzing your work day.
You can actually use this app called DeskTime. I use this app for me to identify what tools I was using the most and I found out that I like to use Microsoft Word a lot. Also, I'm able to track the internet pages that I'm surfing, and what kind of content I'm looking at. DeskTime really helps you have a better picture of how your workday typically looks like, giving you a better idea on how you can tweak, delegate or maybe even automate some of the activities. So if you wanted to check that out, in the show notes I'll give you the direct link to DeskTime.
#2 - Identify Time Wasters
Next is to identify time wasters. After you have taken the time to track your day, you'll be able to identify where you're wasting a lot of your time. Total up the time span that you have tracked and then categorize your activities.
Not all of them will fit into a category, but that's completely fine. Good categories to consider are email, phone calls, meetings, breaks, errands and nonproductive tasks. From there you will want to calculate the percentage of time you spend a day on each activity.
This will allow you to find areas where you're spending too much of your time, and if you are like me and you prefer to just continue your day as per normal, you can still use DeskTimeto track most of these activities. If there's any day where there are no activities, you can manually fill that in. Try it — I think it's really helpful for you especially when you are trying to plan for your business.
#3 - Delegate, don't abdicate
The third one is probably my favourite secret of all, which is to delegate, don't abdicate. Being an effective small business owner often means relying on other people to help you accomplish all of the work you need to get done.
You don't have to be ashamed that you need to hire someone to do your work because the more you hire, the better you become. And the more you hire, the more likely you are going to move towards being a business owner.
And that's eventually what you want to do — as a business owner you can change the world far faster and far better because you now can give employment to people.
Well, it can be hard for some leaders to delegate, but it's the best way to make your employees feel fulfilled and keep your very precious time to focus on what's important in running your business.
The key to delegating is avoiding abdication. This means you should avoid giving employees responsibilities without effectively preparing and training them for the task.
The best way to make this work is to hire the right people and be sure to invest your time in training them. Take the time to really make sure your employees understand your standard operating procedure and the responsibilities you expect them to take care of.
I also find that when you are delegating tasks to your employees, it is very critical for you to explain to them why that task needs to be done. It is also important for you — as the leader — to identify whether that particular task can be done by that person based on the skill sets that they have. So being a leader — it's not that easy because you have to be aware of all these things. So just remember to delegate effectively and don't abdicate.
#4 - Use the 80/20 Rule
A secret number four is to use the 80/20 rule. As an effective way to determine whether or not you should start focusing on your time, use the 80/20 rule.
The rule states that 80% of your results should come from only 20% of your efforts.
Implementing the 80/20 rule is a process, so if you keep working on applying it each week until you have a very clear idea of where you can get the most of your time. This principle is very crucial for you when you are trying to identify what activities give you the biggest return.
Let me share the activities that I've done for my business. We found that we spent a lot of our time responding to the same questions over and over again to a point where we develop scripts and responses.
That itself wasn't enough, so what did we do then?
We invested our energy and all our resources to develop a chatbot. With this chatbot, everything is being handled by the robots, and we only have to step in when they request to speak to a human being. That really helps save a lot of time for our business.
So, now tell me what is the 20% of their efforts that is giving you 80% results?
#5 - Plan Your Day
Secret number five and is the last one for this episode, plan your day. I know it's a no-brainer, right? This one may seem simple but it could be a great way to implement the 80/20 rule and see results over time. Though many business owners hate having a to-do list, is sometimes ends up keeping you accountable and can encourage you to work even when you don't feel like it.
The best way to stay accountable for your day's work is to write it all down the night before or the first thing in the morning — I prefer the night before because it reminds me that I have a lot of things to do the next day.
A great way to do this is to write down a list of six things you need to accomplish that day, and do them one at a time in succession. That way you never have to wonder what you should be doing. You would have completed six things no matter what, every single day.
Eventually, the list will stop being a chore and become an efficiency machine where you know that anything you write down will be accomplished.
Also, have a little black book kept handy with you at all times. It could be a physical notebook that is really small and pocket size that can fit anywhere accompanied by a pen, or it could just be your mobile phone with a preferred application that you use to jot down anything and everything that you think related to your business.
So clear your mind by writing down every single thing that comes to your mind, right down into your little black book really helps you. Then, you can decide whether or not you want to do, delegate, distribute, or delete.
So that's the five secrets to organize your time for your business that I can think of right now, but I'm pretty sure more will come along the way. So hopefully you found these tips helpful. Even if you only apply one or two initially, it can give you goals to manage your time better in the future.
So don't give up. You can spend your time developing your business into the best that it can be by scheduling your time and eliminating time wasters.
Once you've become an efficient Fempreneur, your business will become more efficient and more things will be running like clockwork.
What do you think?
I'd love to know what you think of this episode. Do you plan on leaving your full-time job soon to start your business? If so, where are you now in that plan? Share with me in the comments below!
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I'll see you in the next episode, the final part of the five-part series on how to raise capital for your business.
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